Williams: Endangered landscape

Western fish and wildlife are being needlessly sacrificed under a more-natural-gas-at-any-cost federal initiative - a waste of biodiversity that should outrage every American.

Ted Williams

Western fish and wildlife are being needlessly sacrificed under a more-natural-gas-at-any-cost federal initiative - a waste of biodiversity that should outrage every American.

Consider Wyoming's 7-million-acre Upper Green River Valley. Here, in the shadows of the Wind River Range, Gros Ventres, and Hobacks peaks, cottonwood-cloaked streams that sustain some of the last pure Colorado River cutthroat trout curl through lush grasslands. White pelicans flash in the sun. Bald and golden eagles soar and scream. Moose browse wet meadows. Bighorn sheep haunt the high country. Pronghorns and mule deer find winter refuge here. Timber wolves sing from starlit ridgetops. America's largest population of sage grouse - a species careening toward extinction - breeds here.

But this American Serengeti is being turned into an industrial park, tangled with roads, blighted by air and water pollution and noise and lights from heavy machinery. There's nothing necessary or even legal about the way gas is being extracted from this delicate ecosystem, the future of which we have entrusted to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM). By law the agency must do what it can for wildlife - for example, set seasonal drilling "stipulations" when species are most sensitive to disturbance. But companies have gotten exemptions basically by asking.

When I requested an update on exemptions from Linda Baker of the Upper Green River Valley Coalition (an alliance of wildlife advocates) she told me that operators are demanding and getting multi-year, carte blanche dispensation for all stipulations. "This is a flu bug that's going around the West, and it started here," she declared, citing the example of EnCana Oil and Gas, currently trying to wangle permission from BLM to drill year-round in critical big-game winter range near Grass Mesa, Colorado by offering, as alleged mitigation, $375,000 for road maintenance.

BLM is legally required to manage for "multiple use;" but Americans can't use their own land because it's reserved for the gas industry. In 2004, when I inspected the valley's 30,000-acre "Jonah Field," there were 601 gas wells, many spaced only 40 acres apart. The landscape was slashed with new roads and littered with plastic-lined spoil pits containing scum-encrusted, hydrocarbon-contaminated wastewater that kills waterfowl. Today the mess is worse, and there are 1,580 wells with 2,017 more going in.

Another wildlife sacrifice area is the 200,000-acre Pinedale Anticline where, amid a morass of new roads and drilling pads, Baker and I watched two dozen male sage grouse boom, strut, puff, butt chests, fan their spiked tails, and flash their yellow air sacs. The BLM permits gas development within a quarter mile of these courtship display areas, even though its own data show that birds can't tolerate such disturbance inside three-miles.

There are 166 wells on the Anticline, and now the BLM is proposing an additional 4,399. The disturbance will surely extirpate sage grouse, pronghorn and mule deer. Environmentalists, sportsmen, ranchers, the town of Pinedale and Wyoming Governor Dave Freudenthal are furious. "This was a field that could have been a premier showpiece for the BLM and industry," says Baker, whose coalition has never opposed reasonable gas development. "Instead we have another Jonah field."

Suddenly traditionally conservative elements are working with Baker's coalition. The venerable, hook-and-bullet magazine, Field & Stream, has been savaging the Bush administration for unlawfully excusing the gas industry from regulations and siccing it on their best and most sensitive fishing and hunting areas.

The State of Montana has taken the unprecedented step of filing a formal protest against a federal plan to festoon the banks of the storied Beaverhead River, one of the finest trout streams in the world, with roads and gas wells.

And the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, representing the best and brightest of sportsmen-conservationists, has just filed its first lawsuit. This against the BLM for the illegal authorization of 2,000 new oil and gas wells and 1,000 miles of new roads in central Wyoming's wildlife-rich Atlantic Rim. "We've had it, and sportsmen have had it," says the Partnership's communications director, Tim Zink. "The environmental analysis is horribly incomplete. The plan would absolutely decimate wildlife."

Zink's group had derailed an administration plan to gut the Clean Water Act by quietly bringing the concerns of its predominantly Republican membership to the White House. Attempting the same approach with the impending rape of the Atlantic Rim, Zink and his colleagues had filed an administrative appeal with the Interior Department.

Interior didn't give them the courtesy of a response. Instead the Partnership learned from gas-industry press releases that its appeal had been rejected.